The Kapitän goes way back, all the way to 1938 and continuing through 1970 (or 1978, if you count the Kapitän-based Admiral and Diplomat). Here's an entertaining animated German-market TV ad for the big, Detroit-inspired Opel luxury sedan of the early 1960s.

That ad doesn't show the car itself, so here's one showing the desire of a happy German family for the late-1950s Kapitän and Rekord.

The Kadett A revived the Kadett name after the cancellation of the model during World War II (though Kadett copies were built in the Soviet Union well into the 1950s). Here's a series of German TV advertisements for GM's Volkswagen Beetle competitor of the early 1960s.

By 1966, the Opel Rekord had become a Chevelle-influenced big seller. Here's a German ad showing a Rekord C being driven hard.

Everyone has seen the ad depicting a middle-aged Battle of Kursk vet who's too plump to fit in the tiny Opel GT, so we'll show this lesser-known GT ad that features the car tearing around a wet highway.

Opels were sold by Buick dealers in the United States, and the first-generation Manta was the German Mini-Camaro to the Opel GT's German Mini-Corvette. Here's a US-market ad for the 1973 Manta Luxus (the Luxus name sounded so cool that Buick ended up putting it on Detroit-built cars as well).

As the 1970s wore on, the mix-and-matching in the Opel/Vauxhall/Holden/Isuzu/Daewoo world reached bewildering levels, with Isuzu-powered Kadett Cs— you might know this car as the Daewoo Maepsy, or as the close cousin of the Chevy Chevette— sold as "Buick Opels" in the United States.

Disappointingly, the Manta B was not sold in North America, which means that we missed out on one of the greatest films ever made. Here's a German ad showing the Manta GT/E with a woman who starts out in a Teutonically scary science-fiction bondage outfit and then goes Manta road-tripping in ordinary tourist clothes. That's Manta life!

The Opel Corsa never has been sold in the United States, so we never saw the rage directed at the second-generation Corsa by jealous German supermodels with hair-mounted crystal boomerangs and/or squads of enforcers.

However, the Opel Omegawas sold on this side of the Atlantic, as the Caddy That Zigged. Here's how GM pitched the Omega in its homeland: by bragging about an Omega torture test in Arizona.